Airial Clark, MA Parenting and Sexual Health Expert

Category Archives: Poetry

I wasn’t raised with a religion… so I first learned about redemption via recycling PSA’s.The word had a very narrow definition associated with keeping streets clean and something about saving the planet. Minds like mine depend on metaphors for meaningful analysis, so for me, when the older definition of redemption started making appearances in the books I was reading, ‘Heaven’ looked like an ally full of semi-deranged homeless men, broken by war or addiction, bowing under massive wings, collecting 5 cent souls out of cloud lined garbage cans. God’s grace looked like the dingy depository; sorting conveyor belts stretching into infinity.

A priori knowledge is a tricky thing… especially when you’re a poor kid with a brain like an accordion.

Valentine’s day has come and gone. And this year I made no promises, broke no vows, and kept myself mostly to myself, but as I’m walking the lake with my 4-legged BFF, we come up to the most beautiful trash receptacle I’ve ever seen. This trash can is on the exit I take from the lake to my street. A marker. Turn left, go up a hill. My place.

“Recycle my heart” is what this says to me. Yes, please. Can I deposit the heart I’ve got, the love I’ve had, the love that feels used and spent and maybe having outlived it’s original purpose can be melted down and a new heart will appear?

Maybe the structural integrity of my heart has been compromised, but the essential ingredients are still precious. How much is copper going for right now? What is it’s redemption value? How many ways can a steel heart be refashioned; made lighter with each trip up the conveyor belt? Just keep my love out of the landfill. Keep my love circulating. Don’t let me be lazy and throw it away.

2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”[1]) is a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective state, conscious or unconscious, of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes, as defined in neurological psychology (a “liminal state”) and in the anthropological theories of ritual by such writers as Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner[2].

As developed by van Gennep (and later Turner), the term is used to “refer to in-between situations and conditions that are characterized by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty regarding the continuity of tradition and future outcomes”[3].

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality

One foot through the door, raised in the air, free before landing the step. While the other foot lingers, maybe even appearing rooted to the floor. One hand floating far ahead, fingers extended waiting to touch what’s next. The other hand clasped behind, knuckles engaged fierce grip on the known. A face of welcome with an expression of rejection. A balance struck out of refusal to commit.

Commit?

Peeking through open windows to see how ‘they’ do it, catching their unfamiliar scent of satisfaction, of certainty, of the knowledge that this, this is it.

We are told we who are from the outside in. We’re given labels and categories and containers that fit. We arrive in the world without question of where we belong because we are claimed by our kin.

Identity is poured on us like concrete, time just passes to let it set. But what if you are casted as different? I mean, the cement casing, the label, the very identity that you are locked into by your family is in fact the label of DIFFERENT. Maybe special, maybe blessed, maybe damaged, maybe distressed. Being different, I feel I was instructed to look for something else always, something else, always something else. Never here. Never now. Never this.

Cement casings get heavy. They crumble. They prevent fluidity. We can crash into obstacles, learn to smash the joints and edges strategically. Work our way free via destruction.

Freedom through destruction.

Dismantling. I got good at dismantling. Once free, the goal is never to be caught again. Ever. A floating spirit, a flickering flame. The drive to live unencumbered wins out over any other hunger, because the only alternative I’ve ever known is heavy binding cement.

Cloud or statue? Lightning strike or suit of armor? Streaming wind or rolling boulder? Which would you chose if you had to answer? Being of both and neither. Of many and none. Liminal.

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

–Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan

I’ve had this blog over a year. I remember my last valentine’s post. A graphic with a poem. A promise made from my heart to the universe. An agreement to my lovers, both known and not: I will always vice your versa. That’s the best I can do.

Sounds and scents get tangled up for me. I hear a song; I want a cup of coffee. The scent of my cigar stains my finger tips; a bass line presses through silence into my ear. My head can sway with the beat found in the short life of a rose tea candle’s flame. The melody of smoke rippling at the end of a jasmine incense stick. It’s all swirling, all the time.

I have a lover I think of in the past tense most of time. I have a lover that only exists in brief text exchanges. I have a lover I haven’t really been able to love yet. I have the warm soft flesh of a new lover waiting for me. There’s that ache of want and have, of need and abstain. They get tangled up for me. It’s all swirling, all the time.

People who chose to walk in straight lines confuse me. People who give it their all to keep an even pace amaze me. It comes natural or it doesn’t. I’m afraid, but I’ll show up anyway. I was brave and stayed home. I was a coward and appeared in the crowd to be one of many on a dark street. I fight hardest when calm, I’m ineffective when enraged. How many loop de loops before my heart gets used to the vertigo and the ground never feels the same? They get tangled up for me. It’s all swirling, all the time.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Take a deep inhale of the scents surrounding you, listen to the sounds in your head, see the words behind your eyes. Let it all get tangled up inside. It’s all swirling, all the time.

This is a great point by point takedown of pseudo-science used as fear-mongering.

Humans are not prairie voles. We are not guinea pigs or mice. We're humans. Pop science loves to trot out research on rodents to confirm or challenge behavioral assumptions. But what the writers often miss is that our behaviors are shaped by far more than food, fights, flights and fucking. Humans are highly complex social primates and, … Read More

The piece is Airial’s Commute, which Makana and I recorded in my living room. He did an amazing job on the music. He did a great job getting me to go there, into an emotional space in order to capture some of what I felt while writing. I don’t get directed very often. It’s good that we had the connection we did, or else I don’t think the track would have come out the way it did. That sounds ridiculously obvious, I know. But it matters to me. We made a great piece of sonic art together.

As a child, my mother’s insanity permeated our home, wrapped about us like a cloak, charging the air. You could feel it when you walked up our steps that someone crazy lives here. The shadowy forms my mother was afraid of would not be stopped by a locked door. She was always ready for the windows to be busted, waiting for the door to get kicked off the hinges. I had no idea who our attackers were supposed to be, but I had a hunch that they would end up needing my protection. I believed she would kill them. It would make her feel… accomplished. A rapist, a serial killer, kidnappers, some demented being who deserved to die; she was waiting for them.

She would fall asleep in the broken green recliner facing the front door night after night. She didn’t need a weapon; she fantasized about strangling them with her bare hands. The physical manifestations of her internal tormentors finally come to validate living a life under siege. My mother had watched way too many John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies. And people in our neighborhoods did get attacked, robbed, raped and intimidated. Ex-husbands appeared in the middle of the night, crackheads crawled in through the bathroom window, the Eastside, then Southside, then Northside Rapist scaled walls to the second story patio…and a locked door did what to protect them? It was all very real, and yet, it never happened to us; a mother alone with two children, doors and windows wide open. I believed it was because she was that damn crazy.

So I forget to close doors sometimes, and I definitely don’t have a habit of locking them. As a young adult, it was and wasn’t a challenge: You want what I’ve got, well I dare you to try and take it. But, really, there’s nothing here you’d want. All of my belongings only have value to me, and you can’t have me, I’ll kill you if you try, so really, why would you bother?

That was part of my mother’s reasoning: when you are poor, people breaking into your home aren’t there for a stereo. The people locked inside the box where the valuables. An unlocked door was an acknowledgement of purpose and battle; cross this threshold and anything could happen.

Once I became a mom, I had to change. I still didn’t have much faith in locking a door. I did it because I was supposed to, it would be irresponsible not to. When I brought my first son home from the hospital, I used the door chain for the first time ever. I also knew I couldn’t generate the same force-field as my mother, I wasn’t crazy enough, and that scared me. I felt as if my children were exposed.

So I prayed. At night before I fell asleep I would ask the universe for help and a goddess would place her foot on the roof of my home. She stood guard as I willed her into being, 50 feet tall, starlit and watching. A giant woman of light and energy would stand above my babies’ beds, unwavering in her defense until I woke up in the morning.

…today, my children often lock our front door
before I remind myself to.
And I wonder if I have failed them.
No, I tell myself, they are just being rational;
Raised by a sane person.
For me though, it’s still a form of magic.
When I bolt the door,
there is still a tinge of superstition;
a prayer of gratitude:
Thank you for the protection.
Thank you for being a solid boundary.
Thank you for being the first line of defense
so I don’t have to be.

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